Abstract
Sustainability matters along with attention to a company’s social and environmental commitment and the related (complex) performance is far from new in the literature, but the last years have pressed both academics and managers by urgent issues such as climate changes and disasters, poverty, economic and social crisis in many countries, human rights violations, health concerns and so on. Also, the end of twentieth century saw unprecedented changes in corporate strategy and management towards sustainable thinking—the emergence of sustainability as corporate strategy, and making sustainability an integral part of a company’s business strategy in order to gain bottom-line benefits and to accomplish new law requirements. In such a global, unstable, market, sustainability becomes an investable concept, crucial in driving interest and investments to the mutual benefit of companies and investors. Toyota’s commitment for a sustainable management has been developed since decades ago and continues nowadays, representing a perfect example for the whole market, and witnessing the urgency of an integrated approach along the supply chain, in order to gain competitive advantage through ‘sustainability’.
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- 1.
‘The greatest pressure, at least externally, is coming from national regulators in the countries where firms operate. But pression is also coming from stakeholders—shareholders, business partners, and employees—and increasingly, from the companies themselves as they struggle to successfully combine performance and purpose in the post-recession world’ (The Economist 2010).
- 2.
The stakeholders approach indicates that organisations are not only accountable to its shareholders but should also balance a multiplicity of stakeholders interests that can affect or are affected by the achievement of an organisation’s objectives (Freeman 1984).
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One remanufactured part uses 80 % less energy, 88 % less water, 92 % fewer chemical products and generates 70 % less waste during production compared to a new part (Perella 2014).
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Toyota seems to be the leader on the movement from a traditional transport way, the so called ‘conventional approach—transport planning and engineering, to a new, unconventional one: sustainable mobility (Banister 2008). Despite a lack of clear definition on the wider concept of sustainable transportation, we can adopt the Sustainable mobility one, which fits our research aim:it ‘means transporting people in eco-friendly ways. It means using mass transit in urban environments, particularly electrified trams and trolleys and light rail trains for beyond downtown. As it relates to personal transportation, it’s using electric drivetrains—all-electric vehicles, hybrids, plug-in hybrids and fuel cell hybrid vehicles—as well as alternative liquid and gaseous fuels for internal combustion engine vehicles. The goal: To reduce the impact of transportation on the climate and eventually replace petroleum-based fuels—also mitigating the global strife associated with petroleum-based fuels’ (Gable 2014).
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Garbelli, M. (2016). Managing Sustainability to Be First: The Toyota Case. In: Bilgin, M., Danis, H., Demir, E., Can, U. (eds) Business Challenges in the Changing Economic Landscape - Vol. 2. Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics, vol 2/2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22593-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22593-7_4
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